Echo Nest: Create Interactive Music Applications

The Echo Nest is a music intelligence company that has designed API platforms for developers to create search, personalization, and interactive music applications. The Echo Nest’s music intelligence platform combines large-scale data mining, natural language processing, acoustic analysis, and machine learning to automatically listen to music, read about music, learn about music trends, and provide in-depth analyses in these areas. The company is a four-time National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant winner. Echo Nest is also funded by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Argos Management and a great group of angel investors that include three co-founders of the MIT Media Lab.

The music platform automatically:

Reads about music, constantly analyzing millions of blog posts, reviews, playlists and discussion forums to understand how the online world describes every artist, album and song.

Listens to music, with technology actually listens to audio files, extracting musical attributes, such as tempo, instrumentation, key, time signature, energy, harmonic and timbral structures, to understand every song in similar ways a musician would describe it (e.g. “heavy beat, swing groove, fast tempo, 4/4 time, key of B flat, mezzo piano”).

Learns about music trends, analyzing the entire world of online music behavior — who’s talking about which artists this week, what songs are being streamed and downloaded, etc. — to understand the latest trends, buzz and fan opinion.